Archaeology

Anthropology

North America’s oldest skull surgery dates to at least 3,000 years ago

Bone regrowth suggests the man, who lived in what’s now Alabama, survived a procedure to treat brain swelling by scraping a hole out of his forehead.

Archaeology

Ancient seafarers built the Mediterranean’s largest known sacred pool

The Olympic-sized pool, once thought to be an artificial inner harbor, helped Phoenicians track the stars and their gods, excavations reveal.

Archaeology

Ancient Homo sapiens took a talent for cultural creativity from Africa to Asia

Excavations at two sites continents apart show that Stone Age hominids got culturally inventive starting nearly 100,000 years ago.

Archaeology

The world’s oldest pants stitched together cultures from across Asia

A re-creation of a 3,000-year-old horseman’s trousers helped scientists unravel its complex origins.

Archaeology

A technique borrowed from ecology hints at hundreds of lost medieval legends

An ecology-based statistical approach may provide a storybook ending for efforts to gauge ancient cultural diversity.

Archaeology

Homo sapiens may have reached Europe 10,000 years earlier than previously thought

Archaeological finds in an ancient French rock-shelter suggest migrations to the continent started long before Neandertals died out.

Archaeology

‘Origin’ explores the controversial science of the first Americans

A new book looks at how genetics has affected the study of humans’ arrival in the Americas and sparked conflicts with Indigenous groups today.

Archaeology

A taste for wild cereal sowed farming’s spread in ancient Europe

Balkan groups collected and ate wild cereal grains several millennia before domesticated cereals reached Europe.

Archaeology

Gold and silver tubes in a Russian museum are the oldest known drinking straws

Long metal tubes enabled communal beer drinking more than 5,000 years ago, scientists say.

Animals

Part donkey, part wild ass, the kunga is the oldest known hybrid bred by humans

Syria’s 4,500-year-old kungas were donkey-wild ass hybrids, genetic analysis reveals, so the earliest known example of humans crossing animal species.

Archaeology

Clovis hunters’ reputation as mammoth killers takes a hit

Early Americans’ stone points were best suited to butchering the huge beasts’ carcasses, scientists contend.

Archaeology

Arctic hunter-gatherers were advanced ironworkers more than 2,000 years ago

Swedish excavations uncover furnaces and fire pits from a big metal operation run by a small-scale society, a new study finds.